The supposed economic case for mass immigration has finally collapsed, writes Sam Ashworth-Hayes in the Telegraph, as a new report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies confirms what many have been saying for decades: bringing in millions of low-pay workers and their families can never make a country richer. Here’s an excerpt.
It was a delightful theory. Opening Britain’s borders would bring an influx of human capital that would leave the country richer, the tax burden lower, public services stronger and our culture enriched. And, as a theory, it had the great benefit of being all but impossible to falsify unless someone was daft enough to actually try it in practice.
Unfortunately, thanks to the Conservatives, this has now happened. And the resulting confrontation with reality has demolished a truly beautiful idea. Report after report, dataset after dataset, is hammering home a simple message: mass migration is not making Britain better off.
The latest entry in the list has taken a sledgehammer to the argument that immigration is desperately needed to prop up our crumbling public services.
As the Institute for Fiscal Studies argues, the “fiscal headroom” generated by immigration is largely illusory. Rather than the result of carefully selecting for high income, low-cost arrivals, it has rather more to do with the way the Office for Budget Responsibility comes up with its figures – plugging in spending plans that don’t account for the greater demands of a larger population. Once this is factored in, the migration dividend dissipates.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Even before the Conservatives reshaped the immigration system to bring in huge numbers of care workers and “students”, study after study showed that non-EU migrants were a significant fiscal drain.
This is as much about the generosity of the British state as it is anything else; the average U.K. citizen receives more in public services than they pay in taxes. But it does mean that in order for migrants to pay their way, they need to earn very high wages or leave after their working years. Unsurprisingly, many don’t.
The problems don’t end there. Adding more people to an economy will almost always make it larger, but that doesn’t mean it makes the people already here better off. Britain has a serious shortage of housing, congested infrastructure, and increasing conflict between communities with radically different visions of what the country should be. Adding in large numbers of people from around the world does very little to improve any of this, and makes much of it actively worse.
Let me get this straight. When the Office for Budget Responsibility told us that immigration makes us better off, it failed to account for the public spending on the migrants and their families. That’s a weird kind of budget responsibility. Funnily enough, I’ve found that getting a new Ferrari would make me better off, if you just ignore what I’d spend on it. You can’t make this stuff up.
Worth reading in full.
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Can you imagine if they’d had a PCR test for flu and for years prior to 2020 it was just normal and encouraged by government health officials to use these LFTs and PCRs routinely, even if you didn’t have any symptoms? We’d be dab hands at this lockdown business by now wouldn’t we? The world would have ground to a halt years ago because it would be inevitable that they could manufacture a flu ”pandemic” every single year based solely on mass testing. The entire scamdemic rested entirely on the testing.
Even the PsyOp wouldn’t have had much effect without the testing because those ‘positive’ test results needed to be generated. Otherwise people would twig and think, ”what’s all the fuss about? I feel fine/no worse than previous viruses I’ve had. Why do I need to stay home and stop living? Only the old people are dying, like they do every winter” So, without turning this into an essay, the only way they can even attempt a future scamdemic is if they go back to mass testing, this time for another ”novel” and ”deadly” virus that we allegedly have zero immunity against. And if the same people fall for that humongous farce again then they really have got excrement for brains.
Hancock is a loathesome piece of trash but so is this fake inquiry, handled by the Rona true believers (the mafia investigating itself).
But as the article states there will be a ‘consensus’ around Wancocks’s views.
‘Dames, Ladys, Sirs’….what a joke. Our ‘betters’, ‘superiors’.
No they are not smart. They are as dumb as they look and more corrupt. All of them swilled in the Rona trough of billions.
$120 mn quid this will cost us. For what?
To tell us that we will be imprisoned and stabbed again circa 2025 to 2030, to meet Agenda 2030’s goals?
We need a real inquiry, by real people, with real questions, real data, real facts, about real things like LD and stab deaths and injury, vs the real 20K dead from Rona, not with fake tests.
We don’t need the usual pantomine which asks nothing of importance. I wouldn’t doubt if the ‘report’ is already written.
To be fair, in defence of his strategy, I reckon I could suppress Matt Hancock “out of the air.” I just require a Titan sub to do it.
I would love to suppress Wancock with a very large rock dropped from a cliff on top of the soyboy below, as he fondles his married lover.
Ferdill,
It Has been suggested by some heartless people, perhaps those naughty “far-right” folk we are constantly warned about; that we need a Real Inquiry, with Real Peasants, Real Flaming Torches and Real, well sharpened Pitchforks.
Whilst such an Inquiry might be more productive than your sensible and quite modest proposal, I fear we are extremely unlikely to get either.
There was no pandemic
Yep no painted cross on any door I saw, no carts going round collecting the dead, but some Welsh councils did dig some extra graves just in case. A lot of “measures” were a modern version of the King Charles 2nd version of 1666, so there was some planning.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/lessons/2267-popup.htm
Sadly – needed repeating tof.
It seems to me like the strategy of the establishment for cementing lockdowns, testing, masks and jabs as the default response to future “pandemics” is to pretend that the effects of flu are radically different to coronavirus or other respiratory viruses, and so require a radically different approach.
I suppose the public aren’t scared enough of the flu so they need to be gaslighted into thinking flus and colds are so radically different as to requite radically.different approaches
One of the essential ingredients of the hoax, yes.
The reason why this committee met last in 2010 is obviously that there was never a reason to exist for it at all save as Government’s doing something!
headline generator at a time when the WHO was trying to inflict another Deadly pandemic!!1 onto mankind. 2009 – swine flu hoax. 2010 – end of political fallout from that.
Give me patience, Lord, and please administer a celestial size 11 boot up the backsides of these numpties.
There was no pandemic. There have been no real “public health” emergencies in decades, except for those that seem to have been caused by “authority” insisting on mandated poisoning of the environment and the animal and human populations.
I don’t recall growing up under the shadow of fear from disease, this is a new thing created in the last 20 years. Seems that those with vested interests like to perpetuate the myth that disease and pestilence would be stalking the population without them riding to rescue on white chargers brandishing syringes full of the latest patented prophylactic.
I don’t recall growing up under the shadow of fear from disease, this is a new thing created in the last 20 years.
2004, to be precise, the Bird Flu pandemic which never was and also the time when flu vaccines started to be marketed aggressively. By that time, I was very much surprised that someone even considered vaccinating people against the flu.
Yes and the line of questioning or reading between the lines of the KC seems to suggest his own bias and the inquiry conclusion already. Lock down sooner, more control in plans, harder lines of forced compliance, any suggestion of a novel virus treat as deadly to all, more control of the elderly …
And if they are still doing lateral flow tests to testify at this expensive spectacle ? Then it is a forgone conclusion. Authoritarian recommendations for the future.
When ignoring all the side issues, ie, hordes of Scottish and Welsn teetotalers charging into the hospitality industry on their wooden hobby horses, Corona was a giant money-making scam which probably only came to an end because taxpayers had been plunderen so thoroughly that there was nothing more left to take. The second season is to follow as soon as economic recoverly is complete enough that the merry looting can profitably recommence.
Have you noticed that people now often define themselves by their malady, “hello I’m diabetic/asthmatic/have ME/MS, an auto-immune disease/allergy? No longer are they the butcher, baker,candlestick maker. We need to stop talking about medical conditions and go back to talking about the weather…..
Ok, I think that you have not quite understood the tactics of the KC here. He is gradually asking questions to limit the answers that can be given later, Hancock has already said faster harder lockdowns, but there is no evidence that these did any good, and a great deal that they did so far, untold harm. The next question in module 2 will be something like “what made you think that lockdown was the correct policy”, followed by “what eveidence have you from the first, to decide on more?”. This puts the so called experts right on the line when they have to answer “none at all!”. Then “why did you call for the then”?
The next part will be expert evidence on the PCR tests (forget the lateral flows, they were just nonsense placebos, which were very non-specific). The answer to that will be they are very good and accurate. Except that they were not, because they were misused in method. 40 cycles would find a single incidence of a small bit of DNA in a sample. But it is widely known that this is far too sensitive, and does not show replicating anything! A test at 20 cycles (in other words about a million times less sensitive) would show a large population of the DNA, therefore likely real infection. The chance of a single incidence of something causing infection is very small.
As all of the above is well known science, why did they do 40 cycles? Because the Chinese told them to! There you have the whole scam in one sentance. Who profited? The Chinese. Who suffered severely, US. Job done!
As all of the above is well known science, why did they do 40 cycles?
As far as I know, that was because the two guys who developed and sold the original tests (Christian Drosten and a business partner of him who owns/ owned a company manufacturing such test kits) recommended doing so. Possibly unspecifically: Start with 20. Increase until you find something. That got us the pandemic where each and every conventional measure of disease was supplanted with positive test results plus something, eg, death because of skull trauma after getting hit by a cow suddenly falling from the sky with a positive test result a fortnight ago => COVID death, positive test result without anything else => asymptotically sick, chronic nosebleed because of constant swabbing => long COVID and so on.